Meaning: fly_V

Illustrative Context

Birds can fly but people can’t.

Disambiguation

• The verb (to) fly, not the noun for the insect (a) fly, which is the separate IE-CoR meaning fly_N.

Target Sense

• The general, default verb for birds moving through the sky.

• Avoid other roots used in more specific senses: e.g. fly off, fly away, soar, flit.

• Ignore figurative, non-literal senses of English fly, when used to mean just go fast, flee, and so on.

• In some languages, e.g. in Slavic, motion verbs like fly may reproduce the (part aspectual, part directional) opposition between two separate roots for go vs. walk. For fly this can correspond to an opposition between:

  • a neutral iterable verb fly, e.g. Where is that bird flying to?
  • a habitual verb fly (often morphologically more marked), e.g. Little chicks don’t yet know how to fly.

• In such cases, if neither root is more basic or default than the other, then exceptionally, both may be entered as synonyms. See also the definition for the IE-CoR meaning go.